What is Silver Used For? | SILVER INDUSTRIAL USES

Jan 15, 2019

Silver - (n) a chemical element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47. In its pure .999 fine form, it is a solid white, highly reflective, heavy, dense, comparatively soft, malleable, ductile metal which can tarnish black with long exposure to open air. A valued precious metal that is used for coinage, jewelry, and thousands of various modern day industrial and electronic applications.

We humans have been mining silver for over 5,000 years.

Born from exploding stars, silver is virtually indestructible on a molecular level.

The vast majority of all the silver we humans have ever mined is no longer easily accessible nor with us today.

Unlike gold, silver has often been cheap enough in fiat currency valuations allowing humans to waste trace supplies of it in cumulative large un-recycled amounts.

In other words, often we humans have thrown silver away in non recycled trace amounts. Think about all the electronics you have thrown away in your lifetime. Well they mostly all had trace silver within them.

As well, there are many more billions of silver ounces spread around the world in various forms of .925 jewelry, silverware, as well within industrial or electronic application like within your computer, your cell phone, etc.

Many electronics recycling companies now mine for precious metals like silver in old hardware and electronics before being lost to landfills. Although with less than 20¢ per cell phone or 50¢ of silver laced per computer, how much of this silver will actually be retrieved as opposed to thrown out remains a real question.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about silver is how multivariate and wide it’s modern day uses are.

Silver is second only to crude oil (or arguably fresh water) in the amounts of items and things it is used in for our modern ways of life.

Why are there so many Silver uses?

Silver has an extremely high reflection for light, more so than any other metal. Next time you go to the bathroom, take a look at yourself in the mirror. You are likely looking at your silver tin paste reflection.

Silver is the most electrically conductive metal of all.

Silver is the best both thermal and electrical transmitter of all metals.

Silver is also germicidal by nature and thus used in various antibacterial applications and likely one of the reasons as to why it got its start in silverware (the old European aristocracy likely got sick, less often eating with silverware).

Silver is easily malleable and ductile, only slightly harder than gold. This makes silver very flexible and able to be used in various ways, all the way down to the tiny micro and nano particulate level.

The precious element of silver is only produced in star supernova. In other words the production or origin of silver elements only comes from the most violent phenonmenon we human beings know of. It's not replicable.

Although silver may be found in small trace amounts in both sea water and human beings, silver is a very rare and precious metal here on Earth.

Without it, we would have a much more difficult time with our modern ways of life.

Humans almost intrinsically know silver has enduring value.

Perhaps this is why we have dug up about 50 billion ounces of physical silver all time. That is just over 1.6 million metric tons, or in other words, a lot of physical silver.

But again, we have lost the vast majority of the silver displayed in that chart over human history.

Geologists estimate that the element silver has an Earth concentration of 0.075 parts per million.

To give you some perspective on how rare this is, if we convert silver’s parts per million rarity into time, we would find 1 minute of silver in just over 25 years of other Earth element extraction.

The following American football field illustration attempts to show the yearly amount of physical silver ore we humans dig from the Earth’s crust each and every year on average (pitcure a .999 fine silver bullion cube of some 90 feet on all sides).

Compare that annual silver mine physical bullion output cube on the left versus the tinier illustrated silver cube on the right. That one on the right represents what the 1980 Hunt Brothers held to supposedly corner the silver market back then.

Contrary to ongoing false Hunt Brother scapegoating claims, these three silver speculating brothers only held a small fraction of the then physical silver supply back then.

The following video gives you a brief insight into physical silver’s origin, how we humans currently mine and refine it. As well how silver is being used today by both industry and investors worldwide.

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